About New research from last week series

Posted by Ari Jokimäki on November 13, 2012

The goal of the New research from last week series is to offer an additional climate research news resource to other news medias. Also, I would like to show that a lot of climate related research is published continuously and that this research is diverse in their study subjects. The New research from last week series does not cover all climate science published in certain week. Below it is briefly discussed what gets included and what doesn’t.

Paper coverage

Papers in the weekly batch are only a minor fraction of all climate related papers that got published in certain week. I have some journals in my RSS feed reader and from their feeds I select those that catch my eye for some reason. The reasons why some paper catches my eye vary from week to week. Sometimes there’s a geographic angle, for example a study from a country that has not been covered in the series before. Sometimes the study subject is so uncommon that I might add it to increase diversity of study subjects.

At the time of writing, there are 76 journals in my feed reader. In a good week, these journals might easily feed me 500 papers. From these I select the 10-20 papers you see each week in the post (or in Facebook or Twitter). Rough calculation shows that I don’t cover more than 5 % of weekly climate research (and the coverage is usually less than that).

There are lot of journals I don’t cover. Some of these are conscious decisions, such as Science, Nature, and PNAS (as an exception, sometimes I do include papers from Nature Geoscience) because their output is mostly from other branches of science and the papers they publish already get publicity from other media. But there are also some other journals missing from my feed reader. I constantly add some journals but there are always some that fly under my radar. Then there are the ones that don’t even have RSS feeds for their new papers, such as Climate Research. I won’t browse journal websites to see if they have published new papers (because that is how I originally did this series and it was very time-consuming). There are also lot of climate related papers published in journals that usually cover some other branches of science and those I won’t notice.

Only peer-reviewed papers are included (with few very rare exceptions).

Paper publication date

I go by my feed reader. Some journals publish in their RSS feeds papers that are in press and some journals publish them only after they have been officially published. So the official publication date is not necessarily from last week. On the other hand, you might see in my batch a paper that you already saw couple of months ago as a pre-print.

Other studies from last week

Originally there were lot of papers that I weren’t sure if I should include them to the weekly batch or not. Many times those papers were left out. Situation was improved with the addition of other studies section. There I can include such papers with little effort and the reader at least gets to know the paper exists.

Classic of the week

In order to be included to the series, the weekly classic needs to have full text freely available online.

Feedback

Is welcome.

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This entry was posted on November 13, 2012 at 5:59 pm and is filed under General.
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